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The open wound of beauty: Kafka reading Kleist.(Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist)(Critical essay)

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From: The Germanic Review
Date: 20060922
Author:Engelstein, Stefani; Kleist, Heinrich von

A general consensus has been reached, at least since Lyotard, that characterizes postmodernism as a move away from questions of beauty and toward questions of representation, a tendency observable not only in art but in criticism as well. (1) Perhaps this tendency accounts for the fact that Franz Kafka's deep engagement with beauty has been largely overlooked, and although the aesthetic power of his stories is everywhere acknowledged, words other than beautiful are chosen to describe them. In Kafka's work, the divine is radically extrinsic to the human, the body fundamentally ...

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